The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (26 page)

The loops that hold the threads to the shaft are all knotted from one long, strong cord, saved and reused again and again. Knotting the heddles is where a good head for math comes in handy. Mistakes are easy to make and hard to spot—until you’ve started weaving, and then the only way to fix them is to unweave it all and start over.

It’s easy to imagine knotting the heddles for a simple tabby. Loop a thread, skip a thread, loop a thread, skip a thread. But tabby was not the most common cloth in the Viking Age. The standard was a plain twill in which the weft goes over two threads, under two threads, over two threads, under two threads—simple, except that the thread pairs chosen were not always the same. On the return journey, the weft goes over one thread from the first pair and one from the second pair, then under the remaining thread of the second pair and one from the third pair, and so on. “So you have to have three heddle shafts,” said Eva. “If you have four threads, the first one goes to the first shaft, the second one to the second shaft, the third one to the third shaft, and the fourth one is not attached to a shaft. You can have two shafts in front and one in back, or two in back and one in front. You have to be very, very careful that you have the right thread tied to the right shaft.”

Once the loom was strung, the work—and the walking—began. The weaver walked from right to left, slipping the weft through the open shed. Parking the weft in a hook on the loom frame, she lifted the left end of the heddle shafts from one bracket to the other. She walked back to the right side of the loom and changed the right end of the heddle shafts—the shafts are too heavy to pick up in the middle and change both sides at once. She walked back to the left side of the loom, picked up the weft, wove a new row walking from left to right, and changed the heddle shafts again. According to one calculation, a hardworking weaver walked 23 miles every day.

Added to the walking was the beating. Every two or three rows, the weaver would insert a weaving sword—a long swordshaped tool made of whalebone or wood—into the shed and, using both hands, beat the weft upward, packing the rows of thread tightly together. The densest cloth required twenty thumps. A more delicate tool was the pin-beater, a slender finger made of bone or wood. Run along the warp from side to side, it evened out the spacing between the threads. The poets said it danced and sang—though the sound, to me, when Linda demonstrated, was more like that of a fingertip on the teeth of a comb.

“I am too tall for this loom,” Linda said, showing how it forced her to bend to work. A woman who owned her own loom would have it made to fit her height—if there was ample wood available. A short girl working a tall loom might need a stool, particularly to get the necessary power into her beating strokes. In the weaving room at the Farm Beneath the Sand in Greenland, a large whalebone vertebra was placed flat in front of the loom, making a sturdy hassocklike stool.

When the finished cloth filled the top half of the loom, the weaver rolled it up around the loom’s crossbeam—a stool would be helpful here even for a tall weaver, for the beam is heavy and clumsy to turn. Then, before she could begin again, the weaver had to get down on her knees to lengthen the warp threads, taking off the loom weights one by one, unwinding the skein, and retying the weights the proper distance from the floor.

All in all, weaving was an athletic task. By the 1400s, a professional weaver working on a warp-weighted loom was expected to finish about eleven yards of plain twill cloth a week. A more difficult weave would take longer. Among the fabrics archaeologists have found are stripes and checks and the fancy lozenge twill that required two weeks just to string the warp threads onto the loom. Unlike an ordinary twill, in which the fabric has a texture of diagonal lines, the lozenge twill has a pattern of rings.

The most distinctive cloth woven by Viking women was the pile or shaggy weave that imitated fur or fleece. The weaver strung her loom for a plain twill and used rather coarse thread in both warp and weft. But as she wove, she added in loops of unspun wool. These tufts were lustrous and wavy, untwisted locks of the sheep’s long outer fleece. Added to every fourth row, with twenty warp threads between each loop, the tufts were long and thick enough to cover the cloth completely after they were brushed out. The fuzzy surface was excellent for shedding rain and sea spray. Even if soaked with salt water, the cloth remained warm and soft—unlike a true sheepskin, which would stiffen up. Dyed blue or purple, these shaggy cloaks were eye-catching; the sagas describe them trimmed with patterned ribbons or braid. Even in nondescript gray, they were popular on the export market—especially after King Harald of Norway, in about 960, accepted one as a gift, earning him his nickname “Graycloak” and starting a new fashion trend.

Historian Jenny Jochens points out that these shaggy cloaks became so valuable during Gudrid’s lifetime that they were considered “legal forms of currency,” one cloak equaling two ounces of silver. You could buy a cow, candles, or passage on a ship for shaggy cloaks. A law passed around 1100 fixed prices of “all imaginable items—including gold and silver” in terms of cloth, with “six ells new and unused homespun” equal to one ounce of silver, the Vikings’ ell being the distance from your elbow to your fingertips, or about half a yard. One pound of beeswax traded for six ells; one cow was worth 120 ells. “By the end of the eleventh century,” Jochens writes, “the previous silver standard, founded on men’s violent and sporadic activities as Vikings, had been replaced by the homespun standard, based on women’s peaceful and steady work as weavers.”

But Karlsefni told the tale of these voyages better than anyone else...

—
The Saga of the Greenlanders

T
HE WORLD WAS CHANGING IN OTHER WAYS AS WELL
, those years when Gudrid ran the farm at Glaumbaer. Not only was wealth now counted in ells of cloth, not ounces of stolen silver, but the Otherworld was not attained in a clinker-built longship laden with beds and brassbound buckets, iron skillets, whistles, looms, bells, brooches, merchants’ scales, oxen, horses, and dogs.

By then, almost all of the Western world was officially Christian. In the north, the last Viking land to abandon the old gods was Greenland, through Leif Eiriksson’s efforts in the year 1000. In the east, the Hungarian Magyars—as much a scourge of the Church as the Vikings were—asked the pope to bless their leader: Vajk was crowned King Stephen I in that apocalyptic year and remembered by posterity as St. Stephen. In the south, the grand Muslim city of Cordoba in Spain, with its library of 400,000 books of Arabic science and Greek philosophy, was sacked and burned in 1013; by 1035 Sancho the Great would call himself King of Spain,
by the Grace of God
(despite the fact that Muslims would control large areas of the Iberian peninsula until 1492).

A woman could not buy her way into Heaven by being buried with her treasures in a splendid ship. But she could earn entrance through godly deeds, the best being a humble pilgrimage to a holy site—-Jerusalem (the way made safe by St. Stephen), Santiago de Compostela (Sancho of Spain’s especial care), or Rome, where in 1027 Conrad II, king of Saxony, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor with Knut, king of England and Denmark, and Rudolph III, king of Burgundy, by his side.

At about that time, Gudrid’s son Snorri, born in Vinland, reached manhood and married. Gudrid handed off her housewife’s keys—and the heavy work of weaving homespun—to her new daughter-in-law and decided to take a pilgrimage to Rome. Whether it was to salve her soul or to serve her wanderlust we’ll never know. It would be her seventh sea-crossing.

She may have had good company. According to
Laxdaela Saga,
a handsome young son of Gudrun the Fair set off in about 1025 for Constantinople to join the Byzantine emperor’s Viking bodyguard. Their route much of the way would have been the same: from Iceland to the court of King Olaf the Saint in Trondheim, Norway. From there south by ship to Roskilde, Denmark, where King Svein ruled for his father, Knut the Great. There Gudrid would have seen the beginnings of the first stone church in the North, commissioned by Knut’s sister Estrid, and completed in 1027. From Denmark, Gudrid and her companions headed south on foot, as was customary, on the Pilgrim Way. They lodged in hostels kept by monasteries and were protected not only by their numbers but by the
Pax Dei,
the Peace of God, which threatened excommunication to anyone who robbed a pilgrim, broke into a church, struck a priest (if he was unarmed), or harassed a virgin, child, or widow. (A few years later, merchants and their goods would be added to the list.)

No saga says what Gudrid may have seen on her yearlong sojourn south through central Europe. Certainly she would have been astonished by the cathedrals built of stone and wood in the stark Romanesque style, with their columns and arches and arcades, the high clerestory windows of stained glass, the towers and belfries, the frescoes of Christ’s miracles, the candlelight and incense. She may have seen the books made in the scriptoria: the radiant Gospels with their illuminations in violet, red, blue, and green of fantastical birds and beasts and chimeras creeping through golden foliage, or of the Christ Child greeting the Three Wise Men under a sky of pure gold and a silver star streaming with colors. She would have marveled at the lifelike Madonnas carved from Greenland walrus tusk. And she would have descended into the sacred crypts beneath the sanctuary floor, where the relics—the foot of St. Andrew, a nail from the True Cross, the sponge held to the suffering Christ’s lips, a shred of His coat, a scrap of His crown of thorns, a drop of His blood, the cord of Mary’s dress—were kept in gold caskets encrusted with jewels. She may have met black-clad monks who lived simply, were kind to the poor, and never laughed. She may also have met the monks that Richer, a tenth-century French historian, described as “colored like peacocks,” wearing habits so tight “that they exhibit the shape of their arse,” and carrying “little mirrors on top of their shoes so that with each step they can admire themselves.” She may have seen Princess Sophie, who ruled the convent of Gandersheim; there, a few years before Gudrid’s birth, the nun Roswitha wrote plays modeled on the Latin comedies of Terence and an epic poem honoring the emperor. She may have stopped at Reichenau, on Lake Constance, where the crippled monk Hermann was working on his treatises on music, on astronomy, and on how to build an astrolabe. Finally, Gudrid would have heard, for the first time in her life, hymns and antiphons chanted in counterpoint by choirs, and the resounding chords of the pipe organs, whose design Pope Sylvester II had brought from Islamic Spain some fifty years before.

She crossed the Alps in the footsteps of Hannibal and his elephants, as well as Charlemagne and his knights, by the pass of Mont Joux. At the base of the mountains she probably met Bernard of Menthon, for whom the pass would soon be renamed the St. Bernard Pass. As archdeacon of Aosta, Bernard had for many years tended to travelers accosted on the pass by Saracens, who exacted murderous tolls. Gudrid may have sought protection by traveling in the train of one of the kings—Knut, Rudolph, or Conrad—on their way to Rome for Conrad’s coronation as emperor. Or she may have crossed after Knut and Rudolph, annoyed by the harassment of their people, banded together to wipe out the Saracen fort and replace it with a pilgrim’s hospice under Bernard’s care.

Coming into Italy, Gudrid passed the white marble city of Luna, sacked in the 800s by Vikings who mistook it for Rome and, in 1016, by Saracens—an attack from which the city never recovered; in 1058 the last of its citizens abandoned it. Her route intersected the Pilgrim Way to Santiago de Compostela, and the number of travelers increased. They walked through the famous chestnut forests of Lunigiana and the vineyards of Montefiascone. They ate lamb and olives and beans and onions, bread baked from chestnut flour, mushrooms, sheep’s-milk cheese, salami, and sweet cakes flavored with spring herbs.

Gudrid came to Rome during one of the few periods in the tenth or eleventh centuries when the holy city deserved the pilgrim’s song: “O Rome, noble thou art and of the world ruler, / Of all other cities in glory exceeding.” Pope John XIX was known for lavish spending, for courting kings and musicians, and for helping the Abbot of Cluny rein in the excesses (like those mirrored shoes) of monks. John XIX was not a priest and had no Church training. But like his brother, who was pope before him, he was a good statesman and a sensible man—a vast improvement on many popes of the time. John XII, for example, was a debauch, spending his days hunting with hawks or hounds, drinking, and playing dice. He so neglected the churches of Rome that rain dripped onto the altars. Female pilgrims shunned the city; the lascivious pope, they heard, would force them into his bed, whether wives, widows, or virgins. Boniface VII had two rival popes strangled or starved, robbed the Vatican treasury, and fled to Constantinople. Benedict IX, elected to the papacy as a teenager, sold the office to a priest so he could marry—then changed his mind and raised an army to take the papal throne back.

But the rot at the core of Rome would not have been apparent to Gudrid. Like her countryman, the monk Nikulas, who wrote a traveler’s guide in the mid-1100s, what would have stayed in Gudrid’s mind was the immensity of the stone and marble city. Four miles long and two wide, the city on the hill was a splendor of churches, sanctified Roman ruins, and the glittering bazaar, thronged with people dressed outlandishly and babbling in dozens of tongues.

If she spoke to Pope John or told her tale of Vinland to any churchman, we have no proof of it, although more than one writer has imagined a secret record of just such a conversation hiding in the Vatican archives.

When Gudrid returned to Iceland from this last eye-opening voyage, she found that her son Snorri had built a church at Glaumbaer—perhaps at her request—and she settled in as a nun. A few years later, on the nearby island of Drangey, Grettir the Outlaw was killed by Thorbjorn Ongul, aided by his fostermother’s witchcraft.

People despised Ongul, the saga says, for depending on a witch’s spell. His own brother-in-law scolded that the killing was “not altogether of a Christian nature.” The man who had outlawed Grettir refused to give Ongul the reward, saying, “I would rather see you put to death for your sorcery and witchcraft than pay you anything.” At the yearly assembly, the Althing passed a new law forbidding witchcraft on pain of exile—Isleif, a chieftain’s son who would become the first native-born bishop of Iceland in 1056, urged that the penalty be death—and Ongul was banished from Iceland forever.

The author of
Grettir's Saga
swiftly frames the moral of this story when Ongul first crashes into Grettir’s hut and confronts the outlaw:

Grettir said then to Ongul, “Who showed you the way onto the island?”

Ongul said, “Christ showed us the way.”

“But I think that wicked old woman, your fostermother, showed you the way,” said Grettir, “for you have always put your trust in her.”

“It will be all the same to you,” said Ongul, “whichever one we trusted in.”

But not all the same, the Christian audience of the saga would have understood, to Ongul.

Grettir’s Saga
was one of the last classic sagas to be written, but behind its carefully crafted text lies a memory of the early eleventh century, when potential heroes didn’t know where the path to honor lay. Ongul is truly astonished at his reception at the Althing: Instead of being praised for killing a notorious murderer and thief, he is outlawed?

Gudrid would have known Ongul and the other men who helped him kill Grettir. They were her neighbors, the chief men of her district; she was related to many of them through Karlsefni. She would have known Ongul’s foster-mother, Thurid.

But to know what Gudrid the nun may have thought of old Thurid the witch, we need to understand what the Vikings believed in before they accepted Christianity—and how their beliefs changed. Unfortunately, not much remains to tell us about the old ways. Images carved on standing stones in the pagan eighth to tenth centuries seem to illustrate some of the entertaining stories Snorri Sturluson collected in the Christian thirteenth century in his
Prose Edda,
which modern writers have used to re-create a Norse mythology. These myths tell of the great ash tree, Yggdrasil, that linked the Nine Worlds, of the gods riding up the rainbow bridge to sit in counsel, of quests into Giantland after an enormous ale pot or a giant bride, of the thieving trickster, Loki, who pawned the golden apples of youth, of Thor’s great strength and how Odin sold his eye for knowledge, of the eight-legged horse and the ship that folds up into a pocket, the gold ring that drops eight rings of equal value every ninth night, and the sword that wields itself. The myths are funny, shocking, and mind-bending, with their doors to other worlds—but how did a true pagan interpret the gods’ quarrels and adventures? What did she think about Ragnarok, the end of the world, when good and evil would destroy each other and everything in between?

Take the story of Thor and the Midgard Serpent. One day, the burly, red-haired, and somewhat dim-witted Thunder God went fishing with a giant. They rowed so far from land that the giant was afraid. Thor baited his hook with the head of a bull and soon got a bite. He fought and fought with his catch, until finally he dragged its head up to the boat’s gunwales—and found staring him in the eye the Midgard Serpent, the evil sea monster that encircled the earth like a living equator, biting its tail. Thor raised his hammer to slay the monster, but the terrified giant cut the fishing line and the serpent escaped. The moral of this story is ... unknown.

One scholar interprets it as a clash between civilization (Thor) and the destructive forces of nature (the Midgard Serpent). Another sees it as the reverse: Thor is threatening the balance of nature and the giant must stop him. The fact that we can’t agree whether Thor is good or bad in this tale provides us with one key to the Viking worldview: “Order and chaos, good and evil, may be opposite aspects of the same things, precariously balanced,” as one scholar says. The gods may exist to give the chaos of nature some “shape and direction,” says another. They create culture by taking things found in nature (or in the cave of the giants) and giving them meaning. In this way the gods gave men poetry and ale. But the Norse gods are strangely like their enemies, the giants. They have “limited powers. They are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. To know what is hidden from them they have to consult wiser beings,” such as the mysterious old hag who lives at the Well of Knowing. And they are not to be trusted. They are grasping, duplicitous, vain, and brutal. Worse, they cannot defend themselves—or us—against the traitor among them, the half-god, half-monster Loki, blood-brother to Odin, who will lead the ranks of evil at Ragnarok. Then, says the poem “Words of the Seer,” Thor and the Midgard Serpent will battle to the death. One—the poem isn’t clear which—“mauls in his rage all Middle Earth ... Now death is the portion of doomed men.”

In
Nordic Religions in the Viking Age,
Thomas DuBois shows how this mythology of doom could be converted into everyday rules to live by. All people, he says, citing Karl Luckert’s
American Tribal Religions,
divide the elements of the world, seen and unseen, into three sets: less than human, equal, and greater than human. The less-than-human are “handled.” Animals, in Gudrid’s culture, were generally less than human. The greater-than-human—Thor and the Midgard Serpent—evoke awe and surrender. Reports from Christian missionaries give some sense—distorted by the writers’ disgust—of how people in pagan times expressed their awe. Adam of Bremen in 1070 describes a festival at Uppsala in Sweden, held for nine days every ninth year during the spring equinox, in which nine male animals of each kind were sacrificed, with the blood used to “placate the gods” and the carcases hung up in the trees of the Sacred Grove. “A Christian informant,” Adam writes, told him that he once counted seventy-two carcases—of dogs, horses, and even humans—in the trees. Such sacrifices seem to be borne out by archaeologists’ excavations, but these views through the eyes of outsiders cannot tell us why the Vikings conducted them.